NAMM 2012: Fender Introduces Kurt Cobain Mustang Guitar

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The new-gear announcements are coming fast and furious at this year's Winter NAMM show in Anaheim, California.

As always, Fender has introduced a plethora of new models of guitars and amps to heat things up in the middle of January. One of the coolest -- or perhaps coolest looking -- is the new Kurt Cobain Mustang Guitar. Guitar World paid a visit to the NAMM booth yesterday and got to check out a few of these guitars in person, including a very nice Fiesta Red model.

What's particularly cool is that this is the same guitar Cobain has slung over his shoulder in the 1991 music video for "Smells Like Teen Spirit," which you can check out below.

From Fender: Kurt Cobain liked Mustangs a lot. For one, he preferred offbeat guitars that didn’t cost zillions of dollars, and the Mustang certainly fit those two criteria. Also, being somewhat physically diminutive himself, he liked to perform live with slightly more diminutive guitars, like Fender Mustang and Jaguar guitars, which better fit his hands and his reach.

Think back to when you saw them on the ’93-’94 In Utero tour, when he seldom went onstage with anything but a Mustang. Quite often and especially later on, Mustang guitars were a big part of what Kurt Cobain was all about, musically.

Inspired by his arsenal of modded guitars, the new Fender Kurt Cobain Mustang takes you back there, with highly distinctive features including an angled single-coil Mustang neck pickup and ferocious Seymour Duncan JB humbucking bridge pickup mounted directly to the body, dual on-off/phase in-out switches for each pickup, a polyester-finished alder body and an Adjusto-Matic bridge with dynamic vibrato tailpiece.